Comment by SilverElfin

HN Guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Good.

Freedom to move around the city anonymously does not mean freedom to move around the city in a 2000kg, 100kW heavy machine anonymously.

Even the US recognises that the right to bear arms doesn't extend to an M1A1 Abrams.

So get the government to purchase speed traps with photo cameras instead of video cameras, triggered by a speed detection loop in the road itself. You know, just like speed traps have been working for decades?

Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

There's actually an incentive to not store more data than is necessary, like the jenoptik average speed cameras, which only store info on speeding vehicles: https://www.jenoptik.com/products/road-safety/average-speed-...

>Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR

s/will/are/

Are you a car?

Of course it would, but mention that and America loses its mind.

Good for the environment. Good for your health (more walking). Good for traffic safety (less fatalities). Good for the health care system. Good for your mental health and feeling of connectedness to your community. Good for the economy (more local businesses and less large box monopolies means more employment).

And on the cons side… hurts oil execs, national and international retailers, and people who define freedom as having to pay $5 to exxon to get groceries.

Because it's not an average speed but max speed. Higher max speed in traffic doesn't make an average speed higher because it makes the traffic less smooth.

For example in Switzerland on some highways during rush hour the speed limit goes down to 80km/h. They analyzed it and it turns out it's an optimal speed limit for throughput.

Within a city it really doesn’t matter because it averages out.

I’m an avid cyclist in a US city. There’s a pretty large radius around me in which driving is <= 5 minutes quicker, not counting time to park. Plus cycling often leaves me directly by my destination. I can’t imagine how much more convenient it would be in a dense European city.

Anyways, what the hell is everyone in such a hurry for? Leave five minutes earlier. Cars are absolutely magical. Drivers sitting on mobile couches while expending minimal effort? Magical. So, ya know, adding a few minutes should really be no big deal. Which I doubt it does.

Big, open highways are different. Or at least I’d imagine them to be.

You don’t need to be either.

Suppose a trip is 5km.

At 50km/h, that trip takes 6 minutes.

At 30km/h, that trip takes 10 minutes.

In practice, this naive way of calculating this doesn’t even reflect reality, because odds are the average speed of a driver through Helsinki was around 30km/h anyways. Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster.

30km/h is actually above the average travel speed you typically achieve in a big city, if you take traffic jams into account.

The average commute is not entirely within the streets with the 30 km/h speed limit. City planners usually try to route car traffic away from residential areas and places with large numbers of pedestrians, through arterials, freeways, and the like, which will have a higher speed limit.

That's not how it works. It's a 30km/h speed limit for one kilometer in your local neighbourhood until you hit the first through road, then it'll be 50km/h / 60km/h / 80 km/h / 120 km/h as usual, and another one kilometer at 30 km/h at your destination.

In other words, it's 2km at 30km/h plus 48km at 80km/h, versus 2km at 50km/h plus 48km at 80km/h. That's a difference of 1 minute 36 seconds.

This is about driving in a city: you spend most of your time accelerating, decelerating, and waiting at intersections. 30 vs 50 km/h doesn't make much of a difference - travel time does not scale linearly with it.

Which city is an hour long drive at 50km/h?

It’s city centre driving that the article talks about.

See, the real problem is that people cover too much distances daily. 50km is more than Luxembourg is wide where it's narrowest. They probably don't commute internationally every day there.

The speed limit is not 30km/h for the entire trip.

No, that's not correct.

It's: "I'd rather have other people have higher risk of dying than me having to do something I'd kinda of not want to do even though the inconvenience is minimal".

Me, me, me, me and me. Fuck the rest.

Well Helsinki achieved their goal (zero fatalities) without banning cars, so that argument doesn't really work. And I count myself among those who would not have believed it possible.

Of course in general you can avoid potential bad consequences of a thing by not doing the thing but that's just a tautology.

>You could ban cars entirely. Why wouldn't you? Would you rather people die than drive cars at all?

We don't even ban drugs here and cars are more useful than drugs. It's all about harm reduction and diminishing returns. Also, autoluwe (but not autovrije) districts exist and are a selling point when buying/renting a house, so your attempt at a strawman is rather amusing.

Since we're pretending to know logical fallacies, your deflecting with a slippery slope. Lowering the speed limit by 20 mph is not an extreme change, and it if demonstrates to improve car safety then yes blood should be on your hands for not wanting to drive 20 mph slower.

Alternatively, driving is sometimes necessary to deliver goods and travel. But the funny thing is, is that I would GLADLY ban cars in all cities and heavily invest in high speed rail. Cars would still be needed in this world, but again it's the relative change.

So no, it's not a strawman. If anything it was an ad hom.

Does this not make a double strawman? What's the point of that?

For example, they might be of the opinion that danger doesn't increase linearly with speed, but more aggressively. This would result in a scenario where they could argue for lower speed limits without having to argue for complete car elimination. Case in point, this piece of news.

Honestly that would be great.

Very entitled comment. The food worker who has to stand up for the whole day to make your matcha frappuccino could enjoy some rest on the way home.